During a recent Skype meeting with our KinderPals in Canada, the two classes agreed to collaborate to write a fictional story. KinderPals tweeted some ideas to KC, and we discussed them and added our ideas. The KC children wondered how we could share our ideas with KinderPals as, “there are too many letters and they will go red and then we can’t send it” on Twitter, their usual communication tool. I introduced the children to Google docs. We created a document and I explained to the children how we could share the document with others and choose who could edit the document. As we recorded our ideas in the document, some children wondered how we would know which ideas were KC’s and which were KinderPals’. Trenton suggested using different colours. The KC children chose red. Nia suggested offering to swap colours if KinderPals wanted to be red.

The classes are taking turns to give feed-back on the ideas so far and to add their own ideas. They tweet each other when they have added some more ideas to the Google doc so that the other class can have a look at the updated version.

Today the KC children added some ideas to the introduction. They added some details to describe the castle so that KinderPals could imagine what the castle looked like. Then they drew pictures of the castle to share with KinderPals via the class blog so that they can get some feedback from their co-collaborators.

Castles on PhotoPeach

Some of the children in KC have been asking if we can Skype with KinderPals again, “because it will be easier to decide when we can see them and ask them, otherwise we have to wait for ever, till the next day, to wait for a twitter.” Other children explain that it is difficult to Skype because KinderPals and KC are in different time zones, and when we are at school, KinderPals are at home. Someone wondered if we could Skype KinderPals during our sleepover. Hal suggested checking on the worldtime buddy app that we use to keep track of different time zones of our friends around the world. We found that skyping won’t work during our sleepover. We will have to find another way of communicating.

As the project unfolds, both groups of children are expanding their knowledge of 21st century communication tools and are learning that their learning environment expands far beyond their classroom.